It's scary, really, how quickly the human race can descend into madness.
Dusk is just beginning to creep over Sollux Captor's shoulders as he picks his was through the rubble back to the relatively exposed and dingy shack that he has erected in the outskirts of the city; which is now nothing more than a shell. All windows are either broken or simply not there anymore, their glass collected on the floor in puddles of crystalline shards that will glint in the small amount of sunlight that manages to peek through. The ash that rose from the fires and earthquakes is caked onto the sky like mud. With no sigh of anyone, much less anyone he knows, he has slipped into hiding.
The initial drop was the worst. Earthquakes, lots of them, followed by fires and storms and cannibals as the aftermath. People went mad, isolated themselves, and they're often seen loitering around corners in groups of savages which are, much like everyone else, not much more than skin and bone and had a colour closer than anything else to the tone of greying, flaking plaster. They're known to strip passers-by of everything they own - even, in more extreme cases, their flesh. When it's the end of the world, after all, food is food, and if you can get your mitts on it then it's better than nothing.
Things got desperate very, very quickly.
Of course, not everyone is completely out of their minds. The few sane humans left tried - and still are trying - their hardest to set up first aid tents and trading points and transport services with the few supplies that they have left. Unfortunately, the cannibals are quick to sniff out these places, and so they become more and more few and far between as they are ravaged and stormed by the groups.
Sollux hasn't seen much.
After allowing himself a few days to recover from the beginning (or the end, as that was a more suitable description) of it all, he ventured out into the city. Honestly, he hadn't known what he had expected to see there, but he didn't like it either way. At all.
It is a ghost town, in short.
The ground is melted, glazed and scorched and still smouldering in places - small orange-red flames trying desperately to cling to life and breathe what little oxygen there was left that hadn't already been greedily claimed by humans. It was days before he saw another person, and weeks before he saw a live one. And even they wouldn't be alive for long, he could tell. You learn to know those kinds of things at the end of the world.
It's funny to think that he used to be the boy that was the strongest and the weakest all at once, the one who hid all of his imperfections and upset behind a visor of curtness and hatred, but was now that guy who cried once when it all crumbled and vowed never to do so again.
Sollux has lost his friends.
Every last one of them.
Or he assumes so, at least, because that's the safest thing to do. Hope often ends in despair, he's learned. But uncertainty is the worst thing; he hasn't actually seen anyone die, and the biggest clue that he has ever found is a pair of glasses that look like they could have once belonged to Eridan.
So maybe saying that they were simply lost was the best thing.
The first conversation Sollux has in weeks is with a rather panicked blur of a woman, dashing around and demanding that he tell her where her children (her sweet little angels, her precious gems, where could they have gotten to-) are. Of course, he doesn't know - he isn't sure how he could. Even without the woman's bandanna covering at least half of her face, her skin is probably still streaked with dust and blood and god knows what else and it would be very difficult to detect a family resemblance even if he had seen any children. After a few minutes of her thoughtless shrieking, he manages to break away, and retreats back home.
Five days later, he finds her lying, curled up, dead, the fragile and slightly more grey and decomposed bodies of two children next to her. Once he is home, he cries for the first time.
The world has become all too sad, all too quickly. Scary, too. Sollux cries more from the loss of hope, the loss of all of the other humans, the humans who are just like him, than he does from his own fear. His own stupid, selfish fright.
We all have it, don't we? Those times when we find our hearts stricken with fear by something that doesn't affect us, or at least doesn't affect us as badly. Something that we have seen end people and break people, something more terrible than any measure of how scared we are. Sollux often thought of the apocalypse of something alive, something with arms that envelope the world with ash and lungs that send it storming once it reaches the ground, blood that boils them all, stirs them up. He imagined it with ram's horns, thick and grand and curling, just like on the animals she had loved so much.
Once, in the throes of one of his deepest hopelessnesses, he might have called it Aradia.
God, does he miss Aradia.
He misses her messy, thick auburn hair, the way strands of it would get in her face and she'd blow them out of the way with an impatient pout. He misses how she would always speak with her hands, especially when speaking of her many passions, of the paranormal and of ruins and of what happens after life. He misses her voice, her soft, almost whispery voice, the way her lips brushed against his ear-
More than anyone else, he thinks of her. More than anything, he wonders if she's okay. It's one of the only specks of hope he has left.
It would be ironic if someone so fascinated by the end of the world had died by it.
She isn't the only one, though. He thinks of Feferi, he thinks of Karkat and Rose and Tavros and Vriska; even, sometimes, of Eridan - he wonders if they're okay, too, if they managed to pull through it all as well as he had (it was all fluke, of course, every last bit of it).
But he doubts it.
Eridan, strangely, had been the last familiar face he had seen - only minutes before the first earthquake. They had had one of their little age-old spats at the side of the road, Sollux smugly coming out for the better (and Eridan now sporting a nice black eye) before picking his way home - only, you'll know by now, he didn't quite get that far. Beggars can't be choosers, he knows, but he isn't content with the last face in his mind being Eridan's fury-contorted expression as he walked away.
Sollux slams the door to the shack closed behind him, slugging his pack against the wall and falling into the rickety chair into the corner with an exhausted sigh, the kind that is on the brink of unspoken words. He is almost completely encased by the prospect of sleep when there is a knock at the door, on the window frame, on the wall.
And he realises that someone followed him home.
His first feeling is not one of fear, but of determination. After living this long through the worst of it, he isn't about to die in the aftermath at the hands of whatever psycho is loitering at the door. Another knock - Sollux jumps to his feet. With a serene kind of calmness, he picks up the old rusty axe he has propped up against the wall (the only weapon of any kind that he could get his hands on) and grips it firmly in both of his fists, the bruised, withering wood pressing splinters into the calloused flesh of his palms.
"Who's there?"
No response. Just a grunt and another bang, further away. It isn't a knock, Sollux can tell - more of a frustrated kick to the ground. "Let me in, will you?" comes an annoyed-sounding voice, laced heavily with a Southern accent. Texan, Sollux thinks, and very coherent.
Tentatively, he approaches the door.
"Who are you?" he calls, trying not to let his voice waver. Raising the axe with one hand, he places the other on the tarnished doorknob, resting it there, hesitant to turn it. It rattles in the wind outside.
When the voice comes again, it's closer. "A friend. Not one of those goddamn cannibals. You're safe, just open the door, or I swear-"
"What?" Sollux cuts him off, his grip on the handle tightening. "What will you do?"
There's a few minutes of eerie, unsettled silence. Sollux can hear his heart thumping against his ribs, encased in the quiet, waiting for something to happen. It doesn't - not for a while. No noise from outside but the wind, no noise from inside but Sollux's shaky, stilted breathing-
And then the catastrophic sound of glass breaking and wood splintering and crashing upon the floor. Hard-wearing, rubber-soled boots collide with the damp wood with a low clunk, and Sollux presses his back against the equally mildew-ridden wall, terrified. The other's breathing is ragged, almost laboured, as if the effort of entering through the window was simply too great.
Realising that he has been paying too much attention to the newcomer's entry and not enough to his face, Sollux turns his gaze a few degrees upwards-
-and meets a very familiar pair of aviator sunglasses.
